Woven textile fabrics, including a plurality of interwoven warp and weft yarns, are used in a wide variety of applications, including apparel, home furnishings, recreational products, and industrial applications. Because of the expense associated with spinning of yarns, and weaving of textile fabrics, techniques have been developed for manufacture of nonwoven fabrics from fibrous or filamentary materials. Typically, manufacture of nonwoven fabrics entails creating a web or batt of fibrous or filamentary material, and treating the web in a manner to provide the resultant fabric with the desired physical properties.
The inherent physical performance of a single layer of fabric, whether woven or nonwoven, is constrained within the limits of the basis weight for that material. Should there be a desire for a single fabric layer to have a higher level of performance, a change in the constituent material and/or the mode of fabric formation must occur. For example, in order to fabricate a textile fabric with a better uniformity of yarn coverage, it is generally accepted by those skilled in the art that the yarn count must increase. An increase in yarn count, however, requires that the weaving process have a lower throughput and a corresponding increase in complexity. When a nonwoven fabric is desired to have improved fiber coverage, typically, additional fiber is used in the web construction, additional cards employed, and complicated air-randomizing or cross-lapping equipment incorporated. Again, a deleterious effect on fabric manufacture and relative costs is realized in making such a change in fabric physical performance.
It has been appreciated in the prior art that a fabric material having improved physical performance could be obtained by incorporating one or more layers of fabric into a unitary construction. Relatively lightweight fabrics, which are much simpler and cost effective to construct, but have low inherent physical performance, are placed in face-to-face juxtaposition. In order to form the material into a laminate or composite fabric, a layer of adhesive is interposed at that interface. The adhesive has been typically selected from those forms including an adhesive spunbond layer, adhesive powder dispersion, or the spray application of a liquid adhesive. The resulting laminate or composite fabric, referred to hereafter as a compound fabric, thus exhibits an improved physical performance, however, the adhesive binder adversely affects other physical properties, most notably the drapeability and the porosity of the compound fabric. Further, the selection of the binder adhesive and the mechanism of application is not a trivial task, requiring significant experimentation to obtaining a laminate or composite fabric exhibiting the best balance of performance characteristics.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,761, to Sternlieb, et al., attempts to address the issue of forming a composite woven-nonwoven fabric without a binder adhesive by the use of hydroentanglement. The Sternlieb patent discloses various techniques for hydro-enhancing and hydro-patterning fabric, including a hydro-bonded nonwoven and woven fabric composite, but it is believed that due to the limitations in imaging techniques disclosed in this patent, such practice has met with only limited commercial success.
The present invention contemplates a method of forming a textile laminate or composite fabric from a plurality of woven fabric layers, with the method contemplating use of a three-dimensional image transfer device to facilitate efficient and commercially viable use of the method.